CDD Fellow, Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, has supported calls for the discontinuation of the criminal prosecution of MP for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson.

James Gyakye Quayson faces five criminal charges including forgery and perjury following the Supreme Court’s declaration that his election into office in 2020 was illegal due to the fact that he had not fully renounced his Canadian citizenship prior to filing for nomination.

According to Prof. Kwaku Asare, the government’s prosecution of Mr. Quayson for perjury is null.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he explained that the question ‘Do you owe allegiance to another country other than Ghana?’ at the point of Mr. Quayson’s filing of nomination was vague.

 “We are told by the government that when Gyakye Quayson answered the question ‘do you owe allegiance to a country other than Ghana?’ when he answered ‘No’, he knew that he was providing a misleading response. Gyakye Quayson on the other hand responds and says ‘No, I answered that truthfully because to me the question meant have I renounced my citizenship of Canada, have I applied to renounce my citizenship of Canada’.

“The government says ‘No, that’s not what the question means. That question means are you a citizen of a country other than Ghana’. And the Supreme Court steps in and says ‘Guys, stop playing. This question of do you owe allegiance to a country other than Ghana is inherently ambiguous, it’s vague and so we’re going to step in and tell the nation what that phrase means.’”

He argues that due to the ambiguity the question posed, any answer given in response does not amount to perjury.

“Evans, if a question is ambiguous as the Supreme Court has stated then an answer to that ambiguous question can never be perjurious. You cannot perjure yourself when you’ve answered a question that is ambiguous. Because what the court is saying is the government understood the phrase differently from the person who was responding. So then what is the basis for continuing with the criminal prosecution?” he said.

Prof. Asare indicated that the Supreme Court’s declaration of that question as vague and ambiguous impliedly meant that the criminal case against the Assin North MP should be dropped.

“The Supreme Court, one of the implied consequential actions of assuming jurisdiction was that the perjury case should be discontinued because we did not know the meaning of owing allegiance to a country other than Ghana until Justice Amegatcher told us what allegiance to a country other than Ghana meant, we did not know what it means.

“And if we did not know what it means, then as a matter of law a perjury claim fails and the whole stuff should be discontinued either by the Attorney General or even the court itself,” he said.